An insider’s look at Dodgeball at St. John’s Prep of Danvers

Friday

Oct 13, 2017 at 5:09 PMOct 13, 2017 at 5:10 PM

By Sam Baylow

I believe I first watched Vince Vaughn’s "Dodgeball" movie when I was 11. My father rented the movie on a two-day trial from the local video store, and from our newly-bought Blu-ray DVD player we gazed upon the movie.

To say I was dying from laughter is an understatement. Behind "Anchorman," it was the funniest movie that I have ever seen. The group of misfits in that movie, called the "Average Joes," had their own unique quirks and relationship problems. For some reason, they were quite relatable characters.

Never would I have guessed that this comedy would be a harbinger of things to come for me now as a sophomore at St. John’s Prep. As it turned out, I’d be the one that will create a team just like the Average Joes for the school’s dodgeball tournament.

Last month, an email was sent out to all 1,300 Prep students about the annual dodgeball tournament. Eagerly, I asked all of my friends on the bus and in my religion class if they wanted to combine forces in order to be a part of the most powerful dodgeball team known to man.

For the most part, they said yes instantly. However, the most fit and athletic guys I asked said no, because they had carpools and sports commitments prohibiting them from playing. But the date to submit a roster was coming up. I was getting worried about our team, it was a red flag that the average of my team’s body mass Index was the same as the average of our IQ’s. Jokes aside, our first scheduled dodgeball match was coming up on Sept. 26, and my team was determined.

The typical locker room smells and abandon sweatshirts greeted us as we suited up for our first match. We put on our shorts and shirts, and laced up our sneakers, but wait, where were my sneakers? That is when I realized I left my Nikes in the mudroom at my house. Panicked, I frantically asked my teammates if they had brought an extra pair of sneakers. Ironically, every single player on my team had also forgotten their own sneakers. Heads down, we sauntered out to the furnace that the Prep calls a gym, knowing that we had to forfeit our first two games, because we forgot our sneakers.

We had to wait just two days to play in our next set of scheduled games, and it was nearly mandatory that we had to win in order to have a chance to secure a first place finish.

Sneakers on feet, we walked on the gym floor with swagger and ego. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw our opponents, the school’s baseball pitchers.

Every speck of confidence our team had disintegrated into ash at that moment, and we watched these red headband-wearing kids with fear. When the game started, in a matter of 10 seconds, half of our team was smacked into submission. Since I go to a Catholic school, I'll just say they wiped us out by winning all four games. Our pride diminished like Greece’s economy. The only positive was that none of the other teams showed up, so even though we were 0-4, we were in second place.

As the next week approached on Oct. 2 and 4, my dodgeball team entered the gym as if nothing had happened. We had trained and we were ready to beat these baseball specimens. As we sauntered into the dodgeball arena, the proctor of the dodgeball team said that the baseball guys had not shown up as of yet. They had disappeared. They vanished, and in a blink of eye we had stolen first place from them by forfeit. Tears of joy emerged from the faces of my teammates, as we were winners by just showing up, not to mention the multiple shots that we took the previous week.

But In the end, I guess the moral of the story is that 90 percent of any battle is showing up. The hardest part of this tournament was merely getting the team together to meet for pregame talks in the locker room. Even with some mishaps, like forgetting our sneakers once, we still were A-plus students at showing up.

It is true that the hardest, but yet most rewarding part of life is to show up and do something. Never would I have thought that Vince Vaughn would inspire me to become the dodgeball teammate I am today.

Sam Baylow, a Marblehead resident, is a sophomore at St. John’s Prep, and a Hawaiian shirt connoisseur. He is an avid golfer and skier, while also being a dedicated writer, especially in journalism. His twin brother, Gus, is the lead announcer for the Prep’s live streaming sports network SJPN, so Prep sports are a constant conversation starter among family members. Sam works at the Concordia, the Prep’s newspaper, and is a member of the Improv Comedy Club, also at the school.